Advisor

Why I Work With Business

When I left Greenpeace in 1995, I moved into the rarefied world occupied by global corporation CEOs. I engaged corporate leaders through private conversations, as a corporate adviser and personal provocateur, and spent time with them in places like the World Economic Forum at Davos and other gatherings like the annual meeting of the Business Council in the United States and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in Switzerland. While this moved prompted some to accuse me of being a ‘corporate sell out’, it was in fact a continuation of the approach I began to advocate for at Greenpeace in the 1990’s - that markets could be a powerful delivery mechanism for social change and that working with them was a potentially powerful tool to change our ineffective economic model and avoid system collapse. I have never argued it was better than, or an alternative to, NGO activism, but rather that it was an extra tool society could use to drive change.

My conclusion - after 25 years of this work - is that business can be mobilised to drive change and, especially now, can thrive by doing so. This view is not formed from being an observer - it’s developed from decades working at the top levels of companies around the world and seeing what’s possible - and what’s not. The ‘corporate sector’ or ‘capitalism’ doesn’t exist as an aligned force anymore. It is a disparate collection of people and forces that can be influenced and steered. We can favour winners over losers. We can encourage disruptors – both those inside incumbents and as new players. We can design policy that supports disruption and drives market change.

What is also now clear to me is that we should not waste time and energy (or capital) trying to shift companies that don’t already see the value in change. If they can’t see it in today’s context, they most likely won’t make it because the evidence is already overwhelming. Consider the energy sector - those who harnessed new technology, market and consumer sentiment and purpose, are now leading - and incumbents are failing. Think about NextEra (the world’s biggest provider of solar and wind energy) overtaking Exxon’s market value. Think about the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, being a clean energy entrepreneur.

What these and millions of other examples show, is there is now no conflict between business success and driving sustainability. In fact the opposite is today’s reality - driving sustainability is the best way to achieve business success. In the future it will be even more so. This is the core of my advisory work.

What I Do With Business

Since 1995 I have worked with a very large number of companies around the world. I have listed some examples below. While these companies have been in many sectors and geographies, the core of what I do has not changed. I help business leaders to understand sustainability issues as framing the emerging market context - in other words, helping them to see that these issues are not just questions of ethics and responsibility, but are central drivers of whether they will be commercially successful. The practical work varies from informing them about global trends like climate change and biodiversity loss and how they will drive market change, through to helping them develop their business strategy in response. It might be providing a critique of how other companies have failed or succeeded in their efforts and why. Sometimes I translate or explain the behaviour of NGOs that they might see as ‘the enemy’ and convince them that in some cases they might even be a partner in creating beneficial market change. I give talks to Boards and Executive Teams to help build knowledge and the motivation for action.

In all my work I encourage an approach of seeing sustainability as a way to create value for shareholders. I argue that even if they are primarily personally motivated by making the world a better place, the most important thing they have to do is show that sustainability creates measurable financial value - as that, and that alone, will encourage other businesses to follow their lead.

What has changed in the last decade is that I no longer work with companies that don’t already ‘get it’, i.e. that haven’t yet fully embraced sustainability as the future of business success. I’m happy to help clients with the hard work of figuring out what to do and what’s most effective, once they have accepted that this is the direction they want to go in. But if a company hasn’t worked out the need to change by now, given the evidence all around them, then I question whether I can help them.

I now do most of this work through my consulting business, co-founded with Joakim Bergman, Disruptive Consulting. We formed that company in 2015 to focus, as the name suggests, to work with companies that we thought could be disruptive in their markets with solutions on sustainability. You can see more information on that below. I also sit on a number of corporate sustainability advisory boards. Before that, from 1995 to 2008, I had a consulting business called Ecos Corporation which developed business strategies for clients that built value through delivering social and environmental solutions. More information on both these businesses is outlined below.